3.2 Air Standards

Tanzania is not an industrialized country. As such the country may not be suffering from heavy loads of air pollution as is the case with other industrialized countries; however, all care should be taken to ensure that the country does not suffer the consequences of repeating mistakes of
some industrialized countries.

Also some areas having certain factories like those producing cement, (Dar es Salaam, Tanga, Mbeya), fertilisers (Tanga currently not under production), firms handling/fuel, hydrocarbon, (Dar es Salaam - With TAZAMA as a recent case, among others, are potential threats to the quality of air.

Much of the emphasis in Tanzania regarding air quality is the preventive approach; in the sense that potential developers will be bound to comply with the limits which are being proposed. For this reason, limits set for some parameters are relatively more stringent as compared to those of the more industrialized countries. In some countries, allowable values are set in phases, that is, grace- periods are set for given limits but eventually, these limits are to be changed to stiffer conditions because those which are currently in place are known to be unsafe or inadequate.

For Tanzania, these phases could easily be avoided without suffering significant economic repercussions.

Given the nature of the factories in Tanzania, a few parameters were selected on a priority basis, because of the limitation of resources and monitoring requirements . For each parameter, two limits are given: one for the ambient air and the other for emission. It is much easier to control the latter compared to the former.

It should be noted that an emission limit is a limit value for the concentration of any given substance in the emitted into the air (the emission concentration) that must not be exceeded. The limit is applicable for each chimney outlet, and is normally given in mg/norm m 3 or, in other words, as the total emission of pollutants during a set period of time where a plant is operational, divided by the number of cubic meters of emitted gas, converted to the reference condition (O o C101.3. KPA, dry gas) for the same period.